I Have the Urge to Write About My Mother

When I was growing up and I would hit my brother (as older sisters have been known to do), my mom would squat down, leveling herself eye-to-eye with me, and hold my small hands in her palms. She would calmly and quietly say, “let’s talk about what made you want to hit Duncan, Maya. I want to know more about what your body needs at this moment.” My body needed to whoop on my brother, I didn’t have the words to explain why and I certainly didn’t care to stay in this awkward encounter any longer to try and find them. My friends would complain about being grounded and parents that yelled; in these moments of exploring my needs, I’d yearn to get sent to my room and for a good ole fashioned door slam. But that is life as the daughter of a psychoanalyst.

I have the urge to write about my mother. She is the source of my love of people, my curiosity about the world around me, and my unrelenting optimism. From reading her journals, unearthed from a storage unit, and I cannot put them down. They started in 1976, as she dealt with infertility and spent her days dreaming of children that she believed would never come (I did, in 1983, and my brother, two years later). They end in 1995 when I’m certain my entrance into my teenage years crushed her spirit and ended her free time to journal.

As I read them, I alternate between fits of laughter and unending tears as she reflects on my eating patterns and my ability to recite the alphabet at four years old (which honestly, feels a little late). She has given me such a gift in these journals and it’s not just the ability to see the ways in which I am succeeding as a mother but they’re also reinforcing my ability to remember to forgive myself for the times I lose my temper, understand that my best can look different every day, and accept that raising another human being is the thing most often written about and least understood. She and I accidentally chose a similar path, focusing our lives on making sure other people’s kids were OK, and now, the two paths cross. My mother, the psychoanalyst, created a roadmap for me in these journals. And this is some of what I learned.

Putting my thoughts somewhere, whether by writing them, filming them, recording them, or using a note-taking app, journaling has always helped me cope. When it was a homework assignment in second grade, I filled pages in the orange journals with several enthusiastic “very, very, verys” when reflecting on how fun that playdate with Audrey was. I wrote about everything, and it all felt inconsequential and free of judgment but as I read what my mom wrote on a regular Tuesday when I was two, I know the inconsequential is what makes a life well-lived. Journaling has had a positive psychological and physiological impact on me. Journaling gives me the opportunity to process my emotions and in the long term, this form of reflection reminds me to listen to my inner self and my needs more closely. This helped me relieve my stress and learn that expressive writing has proven benefits. There is research on how writing can change the way that stress is organized in the brain.

This journal is very judgmental. She judged me thoroughly. For me, it’s inevitable for the opinions and actions of those we love to not affect us, especially as parents. However, it is just now, at 37 years old, that I am reading what she really thought about that first middle school boyfriend I had. She closed her bedroom door in 1994, after listening to me talk about how I was certain that I’d marry him, and she wrote about it. To my face, she took my words seriously, listened carefully, and validated everything that I had to say. She’d be at the wedding, she too was certain we were destined to be together, she’d say. In her journal, she wrote otherwise. I learned that I needed to live in a world without judgment and shame and when I felt those natural feelings, I needed a safe place to put them. The blank pages of a journal or in a conversation with my therapist allowed me to safely release those thoughts.

I needed my mom to believe in me, support me, celebrate me, and listen to me. Through this, I learned to be more careful about placing judgment and shame on my children. Especially when engaging in hard conversations.

In my mother’s journal, the shortcomings that my mother had were discussed often — her career, as a mother, as a wife, as a cook, as a connoisseur of the English language. She spoke about them and wrote about them often and it isn’t until now, when I need my own shortcomings validated, I realize how important it is to talk about failure, celebrate it, and hopefully, normalize it.

For me, this means celebrating my accomplishments, forgiving my shortcomings, supporting the people around me, and keeping documenting how I get through each day. Now especially, it’s part of my survival in these troubling times.